Our strange scenario was that after the deploy to the production, we had the same assets served in the view, but the public/assets folder had different assets fingerprint. That could make you really freak out. Hopefully clearing the cache made the trick and the correct fingerprint was back again. We are using memcached extensively so it is a really common problem.
I had also all the kind of problems with caching and some times I had to manually delete the tmp folder in a rails app.
So first lesson of the day:
Cache is a really powerful beast and a must have on a production application. But it can also cause all kinds of strange problems. Before throwing your computer from the window because of the difference between production and development, remember to clear cache first (and if that doesn't fix it, then feel free to throw it).
Second lesson: Try to automate clearing the cache.